t is a regular evening in Lahore where a local wagon wala will still call the next stop Empress Road instead of the tedious Shara-i-Abdul Hameed bin Badees. An old shopkeeper will give directions to Krishan Nagar, not Islampura. The map says one thing; memory insists on another.

Now, the Punjab government wants the map to listen.

At a Lahore Heritage Areas Revival meeting on March 20, co-chaired by Nawaz Sharif and Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz, the government decided, at least in principle, to restore the original names of Lahore’s roads, streets and historic colleges. The move sits well within a broad push for heritage preservation that includes restoring old buildings, gates and public spaces and revisiting the naming of institutions that have gradually drifted away from their original identities.

Lahore, the government seems to be saying, should look at itself again, and perhaps remember more honestly. This arrives at a particular political moment, one where heritage becomes a softer language of governance, and a way to claim continuity, legitimacy, even affection, without the bluntness of policy.

The city has seen renaming in the past, and not just once. Over the decades, entire neighbourhoods were linguistically reshaped. Queen’s Road became Fatima Jinnah Road. Lawrence Garden became Bagh-i-Jinnah. Dharampura became Mustafabad. Lakshmi Chowk was named Maulana Zafar Ali Khan Chowk. Each of these changes came with their own logic: some were about shedding colonial residue, others were about asserting a national or religious identity. Together they created a quieter effect, one that is hard to legislate and easy to feel. The city began to forget the texture of its own past.

Yet it never forgot completely. Old names survived in speech, in directions, in the muscle memory of movement. Lahore learned to live with two vocabularies at once - one official, one intimate. Often, these vocabularies map onto class as well, where those who move through the city on foot, in wagons, in bazaars, hold on to older names, while more formal, documented spaces adopt the sanctioned ones.

For old Lahoris like Dr Ajaz Anwar, that intimate vocabulary is not incidental. A renowned painter, art historian and conservationist, Dr Anwar has spent a lifetime tracing Lahore’s visual and cultural history. To him a name is atmosphere, continuity, a trace of who built and inhabited a place before us. As the government now signals a return to original names, he sees an opportunity to recover the layered truth rather than simplify it.

His only worry is that the earlier wave of renaming often replaced one certainty with another, flattening the city into something more singular and perhaps less true.

He points to the practical absurdities first. A postman trying to locate Shara-i-Abdul Hameed bin Badees when half the city still calls it Empress Road has long carried the burden of navigating two competing histories at once. The current move, in that sense, acknowledges a confusion that never really resolved itself.

His deeper concern is about erasure, because there was, in his view, “an overcorrection at work in the past, a desire to scrub away names that sounded Hindu or colonial” and replace them with ones that sounded more acceptably Muslim or national.

To him, Krishan Nagar has a music to it, a familiarity that belongs to Lahore. Calling it Islampura muted a part of Lahore. Restoring such names, he suggests, is less about nostalgia and more about honesty.

Queen’s Road became Fatima Jinnah Road, Dharampura became Mustafabad, Lakshmi Chowk was renamed Maulana Zafar Ali Khan Chowk, and so on.

abahat Zakariya, a multimedia journalist, professor and founder of Ustani [sic?] says the move reconnects people to Lahore’s past and its rich Hindu heritage. She also says that restoring even British-era names is worthwhile.

Changing names, she argues, does not erase history, nor should one attempt to. The Hindu contribution to Lahore was immense. It was not only that communities were forced to leave, but that traces of them were systematically removed as well.

Dr Anwar believes that respect does not require replacement. If the impulse is to honour figures like Quaid-i-Azam, then build new roads, create new spaces and name those after him. Why must The Mall become Shahre-i-Quaid-i-Azam when it already has a history? Why must recognition come at the cost of displacement? That impulse to overwrite, he says, belonged to an earlier moment. It does not have to define this one.

There is also a moral argument in what he says, one that complicates easy nationalism. If a road was built in a certain era, by certain people, then that history, however uncomfortable, has a right to remain visible. Whether the name is associated with a colonial figure or a non-Muslim past, it still is part of Lahore’s story.

Then comes the argument that to remove it entirely is to pretend the city began later than it did. Beneath all this runs a quieter, more intimate layer, where names are not just markers but memory itself, carrying echoes of first jobs, college routes, the geography of a life once lived without needing to be explained.

It is also, inescapably, a question of language, of English, Urdu and Punjabi overlapping and competing, where Empress Road, Shara and the spoken Punjabi versions of both exist at once, each claiming its own kind of authenticity.

Read this way, the decision is less about restoration and more about whether Lahore is ready to acknowledge the fullness of its past. This is exactly what makes the government’s recent decision feel less like an administrative update and more like a reopening of a long conversation. What does Lahore owe to its past, and which past? And who gets to decide?

Perhaps that is why the old names never quite disappeared. They lingered because the Lahoris kept them alive, because they made sense in ways that official replacements did not always manage to. The city resisted quietly, through habit. Now the state appears ready to follow that instinct, or at least acknowledge it.

Whether this becomes a full restoration or remains a symbolic gesture will depend on what comes next, on how far the government is willing to go beyond principle and into practice.

For now, Lahore sits in a familiar in-between. The signboard may still say one thing but tongue says another. Somewhere between the two lies the real city, waiting to see which version of it will finally be made official.

Kiva Malick is an academician and a writer